…you could completely wipe out the poorest 81 nations in the world, with a total population of 2.8 billion, and the blow to global GDP would "only" be about 5 percent…
That's from Rortybomb. Here is more, mostly on climate change.
Sentences to ponder
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Is that GDP in market exchange rates terms, or in PPP terms?
“…think of pollution curbs as an insurance policy against total annihilation.”
Ummmm. No.
That is an simplistic way to analyze it (obviously). For importing nations, the
analysis doesn’t consider the imact their dissapearance will have on economies
that supply them with goods, and for exporting nations, their production will
have to be shifted to countries which have a comparative disadvantage in producing
those goods. In practical terms, the cost of goods for which unskilled labor is an
input would skyrocket, and that would dramatically affect world GDP. The impact
would be much higher than 5%. I guess that raises the broader question of why
these nations consume so little- see Robert Solow. They will converge with us as
the environment for doing business there improves and human capital grows- see China.
Whoa. Hey Ernest, we are going to need a lot more government spending!
I’d think this would be obvious, but apparently not. It’s called humor.
N.B. that the quote in the post above is from Nate Silver at 538, quoted by Rortybomb in the link.
It seems that global warming is not really a problem, it is a solution.
Maybe Gaia (Mother Earth) is just trying to defend herself against overpopulation and stupidity.
Think of global warming as a planetary fever.
People who are curious, please come with me, I will bring you different feeling!
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The usual response in cases where total net utility points in one direction but the distribution of utility points in the other (e.g. free trade) is to point out that one could, by redistributing the netutility, compensate the losers and sill have the winners come out ahead.
One could respond in turn by pointing out that, while this is true in theory, in practice the winners are unlikely to actually compensate the losers. After all, no one is making them.
But if you believe the winners are unwilling to compensate the losers even when by doing so they do still come out ahead in the net, why on Earth you would think you convince them buy into a policy under which they experience a net utility loss?
…you could completely wipe out the poorest 81 nations in the world, with a total population of 2.8 billion, and the blow to global GDP would “only” be about 5 percent…
Either one concludes half the world’s population consumes ten times as much as is needed to live, with the US consuming many more times than that, or GDP does not measure the product of nature+man.
To normalize the production of the 2.8 billion, we should subtract the cost of living in the developed world, the cost of buying housing and food, to figure out how much those economies really produce. After all, the 2.8 billion are pretty much living without buying food and shelter because they just take it from the land for the cost of their unpaid labor. And many of these people own nothing in the view of most economists.
They live from land they don’t own. A fact that allows economists to argue that these people will be richer working for a white man, and paying a white man for food and shelter that requires they work five times harder than they did when they just lived off the land. That they need to work so much harder is merely the price of living a better life as designed by economists who see those able to live without money to be non-existent.
Like “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” the question for economists is “what is the price of living well without money?”
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